VOL. 8 No. 3 | September 2017

Bioethics News.

10/31/2017

Washington Post

There is plenty of debate about whether parents should limit their kids’ access to Halloween activities and candy, in the name of fending off a lifetime of sugar cravings, or let them eat their fill. With childhood obesity on the rise and many parents eager to limit added sugars in their children’s diet, which approach is best for helping kids learn healthy eating habits?

10/30/2017

Reuters

McDonald’s and Kroc got rich selling hamburgers. Science Care and Rogers have made millions from human body parts. From 2012 through 2014, Rogers and his co-owner, wife Josie, parlayed the donated dead into at least $12.5 million in earnings, according to Internal Revenue Service audits and court documents reviewed by Reuters.

10/27/2017

Science

With time and money running out, Brazilian scientists are turning up the pressure on the federal government to avoid a total collapse of the national science and technology funding system before the end of the year.

10/24/2017

Washington Post

The Trump administration’s decision to prevent government scientists from presenting climate change-related research at a conference in Rhode Island on Monday gave the event a suddenly high profile, with protesters outside, media inside and angry lawmakers and academics criticizing the move.

10/23/2017

Science

New legislation introduced this week by Senator Rand Paul (R–KY) would fundamentally alter how grant proposals are reviewed at every federal agency by adding public members with no expertise in the research being vetted.

Washington Post

10/19/2017

Nature

What will the next 40 years bring? Prognosticators are typically wrong about which technologies — or, more importantly, which applications — will be the most disruptive. We would probably fare no better in predicting the future of DNA sequencing. So instead, we offer a framework for thinking about it. Our central message is that trends in DNA sequencing will be driven by killer applications, not by killer technologies.

10/17/2017

Science

To the dismay of many researchers, the U.S. government announced last week that it would formally withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) based in Paris.

10/16/2017

Science

Some malaria researchers say their worst fears are coming true. A malaria parasite resistant to resistant to a first-line artemisinin combination therapy has rapidly made its way in an arc from western Cambodia, through northeastern Thailand, to southern Laos; now, it has landed in southern Vietnam, where it is causing alarming rates of treatment failure.

10/13/2017

Nature

When the Navajo Nation opens its first oncology centre next year in Tuba City, Arizona, clinicians there may be able to offer a service that has been banned on tribal lands for 15 years: analyzing the DNA of Navajo tribe members to guide treatments and study the genetic roots of disease.

10/12/2017

Washington Post

President Donald Trump is allowing more employers to opt out of providing no-cost birth control to women by claiming religious or moral objections, issuing new rules Friday that take another step in rolling back the Obama health care law.

10/10/2017

Washington Post

California lawmakers have passed legislation to reduce the penalty for those who knowingly or intentionally expose others to HIV without their knowledge, rolling back a law that mostly affected sex workers. The bill, SB 239, which was approved by the Democrat-controlled state legislature in September and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on Friday, will lower the charges for these acts from a felony to a misdemeanor when the law goes into effect in 2018.

10/09/2017

Science

Biotech researchers here are celebrating the long-awaited passage of a bill this week that clears the way for large-scale field tests and commercial release of genetically modified (GM) crops. Uganda, with several engineered varieties waiting in the wings, is expected to join a handful of other African nations moving quickly to bring homegrown GM foods to the market.

10/06/2017

Science

In an alternative strategy, Wang et al.engineered mosquitoes’ gut bacteria. A strain of nonpathogenic bacteria, AS1, was both sexually and transgenerationally transmitted. The strain infected a laboratory population of mosquitoes and persisted for at least three generations. AS1 engineered to inhibit malaria parasite development in the midgut could do so without handicapping the mosquitoes.

10/05/2017

Kaiser Health News

People who are incarcerated face an even tougher battle to get treatment for hepatitis C. Roughly 17 percent of prisoners are infected with hepatitis C, compared with about 1 percent of the general population. Lawyers in a handful of states are pursuing class action lawsuits to force prisons to provide hepatitis C treatment. Mavyret may make a difference, said David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who’s litigating a class action lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

10/04/2017

AMA Journal of Ethics

Pharmaceuticals are beginning to receive attention as a source of pollution in aquatic environments. Yet the impact of physician prescription patterns on water resources is not often discussed in clinical decision making. Here, we comment on a case in which empiric antibiotic treatment might benefit a patient while simultaneously being detrimental to the aquatic environment. We first highlight the potential harm caused by this prescription from its production to its disposal.

10/02/2017

Nature

A team in China has taken a new approach to fixing disease genes in human embryos. The researchers created cloned embryos with a genetic mutation for a potentially fatal blood disorder, and then precisely corrected the DNA to show how the condition might be prevented at the earliest stages of development.

CNN

09/28/2017

Washington Post

Consider the impact of the Public Health Service’s scandalous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Patients were denied needed treatment in the name of science. Launched in 1932, it lasted 40 years and is an example of perverted research with lingering negative consequences. Now comes an investigative report about deterrents in reporting problems with human research. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General found evidence of a fear of retaliation among whistleblowers in research institutions.

09/27/2017

AMA Journal of Ethics

This article describes an educational initiative in which clinical ethics students, who were either in a bioethics master’s degree program or in the fourth year of medical school, spent two days observing health care in an urban jail. Students submitted reflections about their experience, in which they drew attention to concerns about privacy, physical restriction, due care, drug addiction, mistrust, and the conflicting expectations that arise when incarcerated people become patients.

09/26/2017

Nature

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites, but scientists rarely cite it in their papers. Despite this, the online encyclopedia seems to be shaping the language that researchers use in papers, according to an experiment showing that words and phrases in recently published Wikipedia articles subsequently appeared more frequently in scientific papers.

09/25/2017

Science

Add your name to a waitlist for a kidney transplant in the United States today, and you’ll join around 100,000 people, many of whom have already been waiting years. The scarcity of life-saving organs for transplants has raised hopes for substitute organs from pigs, which have a similar anatomy to humans. But decades of scientific setbacks have kept clinical trials of that approach, called xenotransplantation, on the horizon. Now, a few teams are chomping at the bit. Exhilarated by recent results in monkey experiments, some researchers here at a meeting of the International Xenotransplantation Association are eyeing human testing.

09/22/2017

CNN Health

Salmonella outbreaks linked to Maradol papayas from Mexico have sickened 235 people in 26 states, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Seventy-eight people have been hospitalized, and two people, one from New York and one from California, have died.

09/21/2017

NPR

Open enrollment for Affordable Care Act insurance doesn’t start for another six weeks. But the quirky insurance startup Oscar Health is launching an ad campaign Monday aimed at getting young people to enroll.